The 2012 Ontario budget, if passed in the legislature, will have a severe impact on the public school system and the employees who make that system one of best in the world. Though big-ticket—and high profile—initiatives like class size caps and full day kindergarten (FDK) would be protected, a slate of smaller cuts chips away at the integrity of the system. And a series of measures singling out school board employees for compensation freezes, benefit cuts and pension changes ensures that the people who make our school system world class will receive less in the future for their efforts, thus making it harder for school boards to recruit and retain the staff that a top notch education system requires.
Overall the budget proposes a 1.5% increase for education in 2012-13—better than expected after Drummond set the stage for more dramatic cuts. However, 1.5% is less than the expected rate of inflation for the next year—perhaps by half—and so the projected increase is actually a cut in funding. When one considers that the ramp up in implementation of the FDK program will consume nearly all of the expected funding increases in the next three years ($1.2B increase in funding by 2014-15), this budget requires cuts and freezes from the education system for years to come.
Labour Framework
The budget claims that FDK and class size caps can be maintained—and job cuts avoided— only if employees are willing to make significant sacrifices. The sacrifices demanded are by now familiar to anyone who has been following Provincial Discussion Table (PDT) bargaining in the education sector this year: the same concessions sought by the government at the bargaining table are listed in the budget document:
a two-year wage freeze, with no incremental increases on the salary grid;
a freeze on banked sick days accumulated as of August 31, 2012, with future gratuity payout, upon retirement, at the employee’s salary rate in effect as of August 31, 2012. Effective September 1, 2012, all accumulated non-vested sick days would be eliminated;
the introduction, effective September 1, 2012, of a short-term sick-leave plan that each year, and not carried forward from year to year, offers six sick days paid at full salary and 24 weeks at two-thirds of salary; and
filing a valuation of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan in 2012, and securing through negotiation the future viability and solvency of the plan without increasing government contributions or negatively affecting the Province’s fiscal plan.
Achieving these concessions, according to the government, is the price workers must pay to avoid program and staff cuts. These concessions "would allow full-day kindergarten to continue to roll out as scheduled, keep class sizes at current levels and continue the focus on students and classrooms. This will help protect nearly 10,000 teaching positions, including 3,800 for full-day kindergarten, and 9,700 non-teaching positions while sustaining and improving educational achievements."
Failure to reach agreement on this labour framework will only lead to a legislated resolution, states the budget. This threat also seems to encompass job action (such as, perhaps, that being taken currently by teachers in British Columbia, who are also facing an "austerity" program): "Where agreements cannot be reached that are consistent with the government’s plan to eliminate the deficit and protect priority public services, or in the face of - 2 -
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significant disruption, the government is prepared to propose necessary administrative and legislative measures."
Some of us have suspected that the government is prepared to legislate a settlement in this sector, and the budget makes clear these suspicions were well founded!
Pensions
CUPE members will note that the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan is referenced above but not OMERS, the retirement plan that covers CUPE school board workers. Though OMERS is not mentioned by name in the Budget, there is a section on "jointly sponsored" pension plans (JSPP), of which OMERS is one. It is clear that the government is looking to contain its costs regarding JSPPs to which it contributes, directly or indirectly, in the same way it wants to contain its contributions to the teacher’s pension plan.
The government plans to hold consultations designed to "develop a legislative framework" that will cap employer contributions. In case of a deficit, plans would be required to reduce future benefits. Only in "exceptional circumstances" would increased employer contributions be allowed to reduce pension deficits. This arrangement would be reviewed only after the provincial budget is balanced.
These are alarming changes proposed to public pension plans, and one can expect to see plenty of commentary on them in the next few weeks. However, for the remainder of this analysis we will move on to other changes proposed to the education system in the budget.
Amalgamation
One measure that will catch many off-guard is the proposal to amalgamate school boards "in areas of the province with low population growth and declining enrolment." This is meant to achieve economies of scale, administrative savings, etc. Amalgamations are expected to save $16.7M by 2014-15. In her teleconference held the morning the GSN were released, the Minister said there will be consultation on amalgamations, that it was too early to say which boards might be involved, and that boards wouldn’t be identified for another year. The budget made clear that amalgamating Catholic and public boards is not being considered and the Grants for Student Needs (GSN) B5 memo provides further clarity, saying the constitutional rights of Catholics and Francophones in regard to education would be respected.
School Closures
The budget claims that "the way school board funding works makes it easier for some boards in urban areas to keep small and underused schools open than to deliver services more efficiently." It is a preposterous statement: school boards struggle to provide schools to the communities they serve. There is nothing easy about the sacrifices boards make to keep open schools in remote communities. But this government will hear none of that: the budget signals that the government is looking for significant savings via school closures: $43.7M in 2013-14 and $72.5M the following year.
More Cuts Drummond Will Like:
Beginning in September 2013, the number of secondary credits will be capped at 34, saving $22M a year. (Drummond had recommended the cap be set at 32 credits.)
School board administration restraints, amounting to $6.4M will be continued in 2012-13.
A 15% cut to the Curriculum and Teaching Specialists line will lead to 300 teacher FTEs cut, achieving savings of $91M over the next three years, according to the GSN memo.
The Program Enhancement Grant, which "provides school boards with flexible funding to enrich existing programs or offer new programs", will be eliminated, resulting in savings of $66M over three years. $20 million will be transferred from the Program
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Enhancement Act to the Education Programs Other (EPO) grant and used to support outdoor education.
The cuts to classroom computers and staff professional development that were announced in previous budgets will be made permanent, saving the government $121M over 3 years.
The school bus procurement plan, which Ontario operators claim is devastating their industry, will be revived, and is expected to generate $34M in savings over 3 years.
As in previous years, the GSN document also indicated that boards that do not achieve a "high" efficiency rating in their transportation operations will be penalized 1% of funding. Mercifully, the budget did not implement school bus user fees as the former banker had suggested. Perhaps the crafters of the budget realized that rural and northern Ontarians were already being hurt enough by many other measures in this budget. There will be enough outcry already!
A change in how the supplementary area factor is calculated (it will be school by school rather than board wide) will result in a reduction of the school facilities operations grant of $32M over 3 years. (Some of the savings will be redirected to school renewal projects.) Although the non-salary portion of the school operations grant will be increased by $27M to recognize utility cost increases, overall the grant increase amounts to not even $5M (or 0.2%), by far the lowest annual increase this grant has received.
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T:DocuShareJK-12 Ontario2012-13 Ontario BudgetImpact of 2012-13 Ontario Budget on School Board Sector.docx
March 29, 2012
One Measure to Increase Revenues
Offsetting all these cuts, to a tiny degree, is a measure to not implement planned reductions to the Business Education Tax (BET), which will improve revenues by $300M. Drummond suggested an additional $1 billion could be raised through the BET but this government isn’t going nearly that far. In fact, the budget explicitly says the $300M in planned BET reductions will be resumed once the budget is balanced.
Conclusion
Even when it does something good for the school system, as in the BET measure to increase business taxes, this budget makes clear it is only doing it temporarily, in half measures, and only because it feels it has to and not because it wants to. The budget’s education measures, in their entirety, are meant for an audience of bankers and bond raters, not educators and students. Though all the cuts are couched in language that says that students won’t be affected, educators, students, teachers and support staff all know that a page is being turned with this budget. Four years ago the government was determined to achieve labour peace in its negotiations with school board employees. Those days are long gone, replaced with threats, bargaining via bankruptcy lawyers and other disturbing developments. Many commentators will be comparing this budget to those of the Mike Harris government in the 1990s: whoever thought we’d see something like this from a man who styles himself "the education premier?"